i•ron tri•an•gle, noun; american politics. 1) the relationship between government agencies, lobbyists and legislative committees which allows them to dominate policy in any specific area.

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We Want to Live: An Open Letter to Climate Change Obstructionists

Scientists have just announced that humanity has just about a decade to get itself figured out before we have to face destruction.

My partner of six years and I got married at the beginning of September, and now, about a month later, we’re discovering that we probably only have the better part of a decade to look forward to together.

The state of the world and our environment has always been one of our top concerns, and it was something we discussed at length before getting married. Now it’s something we have to discuss even more seriously, especially considering that we had hoped to have a family.

How can one choose to bring a new life into the world when humanity is facing an expiration date?

An even better question — how can a handful of people put profit ahead of the continued existence of humanity and still sleep at night?

The fact that we as a species have known about this problem for decades and have bandied about among ourselves trying to play the blame-game or just outright deny the whole thing is absolutely mind-blowing.

We could have been using that time to come up with solutions, with safeguards, with alternative forms of nonpollutive energy.

And instead, we as a species have chosen to distract ourselves with political drama, cultural feuds, and bloody warfare rather than face up to the fact that we created a ticking time bomb that could very easily be our downfall.

On a tremendously simplified level, this scenario we face now is merely the infamous marshmallow test playing itself out among grown adults.

Faced with unparalleled power and influence, rather than keep the long-term wellbeing of humanity and society as a top priority, our world leaders have instead chosen to eat the marshmallow straight away, knowing full well there isn’t another one left afterwards.

But these greedy, shortsighted individuals — powerful though they may be — are still the undeniable majority.

The vast majority of us seven billion humans would rather live.

And all seven billion of us cannot continue to allow a terribly misguided minority to keep denying us the resources and opportunities we need to insure our survival.

This, more than any other, is the critical point in human history; will we manage to come together and forge a new society, or will we end up divided by artificial and arbitrary differences and succumb to extinction at our own hands?